On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:22:39AM -0800, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
> On Dec 7, 2005, at 12:29 PM, jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu wrote:
> 
> >Some vendors use the marketing term "bonding".  Cisco (the giant in
> >that market) uses EtherChannel or Gigabit Etherchannel.  Other vendors
> >use "teaming".
> 
> And EtherChannel used a different protocol from 802.3ad, as I recall.
> 
> >Now that IEEE-802 has defined a standard, lets stick with the IEEE
> >name: link aggregation.
> >
> >(I regret we didn't call the driver "link_aggr" or "linkag", but
> >then that's my own taste.)
> 
> -- thorpej

EtherChannel is Cisco's pre-standards link aggregation protocol. Some
people refer to all link aggregation as EtherChannel but really that
is wrong and Cisco doesn't help with the matter since it can be
somewhat confusing from their documentation.

Cisco          IEEE

standard
EtherChannel   802.3ad

protocol
PAgP           LACP